Before I begin this trip to the Nth Dimension of Music
Hyper-Space I want to congratulate Dr. F. C. Collins and Dr. J. Craig Venter
for their pioneering work in decoding human DNA. I quote the New York Times "In
short, the human genome exults in contradictions". Perhaps this turning point
in human history, will also be a turning point in the audio arts. There is
no longer any need for us to continue on our, three decade, long trip down
the low IQ path to avoid the contradictions inherent in the most profound
and ancient art form.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BETTER AND
DIFFERENT AND WHY
TODAY'S DREAM SYSTEM WILL SOON BE POSTED TO EBAY

I have preached in my writing that the reason the
audio industry has obsessed over "accuracy" is because this is the best way
to avoid accurately describing what is really happening in our living rooms
when we listen to music. As a corollary to "accuracy", we have also obsessed
with the term "neutrality", because there is no such thing when it comes to
audio gizmos, which are still very primitive electrical or electro-mechanical
devices. But we men like to pretend we are professors when we talk about deep
physical pleasure so we can impress our friends. We do the same thing with
our favorite sports.

What is really happening in our living room? Let's
pretend that we took the Absolute Sound's advice, went shopping, and bought
a $250,000 dream system. We are thrilled. Paroxysm of ecstasy make our body
twitch. A flood of endorphins are surging through our body and we are tingling
all over. Ecstasy, nirvana, and ultimate musical transcendence .for about
sixty days, and then to our shock, the thrill is gone..the endorphins stop
flowing, and not because there is something wrong with the advice, but because
we are real men, and we acclimate to a thrill, and it is gone. Real men then
naturally seek the next thrills, and those thrills are not in our "professors"
brain, but in our body.

Mother Nature, millions of years ago, gave us a unique
brain, and while we all have the same brain, our response to stimulus is completely
unique. This explains why you married a tall thin blonde who loves black leather,
and, I love short fat hairy women who love whipped cream. This explains why
you are a banker and I am a gizmologist. This endorphin secreting brain explains
why I get off on directly heated triodes and you get off on mosfets. And the
transcendent reality for all men is that what causes our endorphins to pump
today, will not tomorrow, and that explains why we have more than one suit
in our closet, why we eat different foods, why we listen to more than one
record, why car makers produce new models every year, and why you fantasize
about having sex, not with your steady mate..and why today's audio thrill
is tomorrow's ad on Ebay.

We need to think we are searching for better, but
in fact we are searching for a new thrill, one that is different, because
that is the only way we can, once again, open those endorphin flood gates,
and that is a good thing, and nothing we are do is going to change this response except we
can become much smarter about it, and not feel guilty about it.

So let's stop conning ourselves about accuracy and
neutrality and admit we are seekers of musical thrills and that means we need
audio gizmos that can flow with our changing tides of endorphins. Instead
of being on a "buy new audio gizmos treadmill" , why can't we design audio
gizmos that are like Lego sets, where we can rearrange the pieces and create
completely unique combinations that trigger our endorphins because, then
we never get stuck in the same old, been there, done that modality?

Only you know/feel what gets you off, it is constantly
changing, and your are right to seek out the thrill of endorphin rush because
it is the hormone of ecstasy and it is the mechanism of musical creativity.
Are we audio addicts? Was Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart music addicts? Is music
the world most popular addiction?

I call this new audio design attitude, 4th
Wave Modality. Any audio designer who tells you that this design flexibility
is not doable, with great ease, can receive, from me, a full scholarship to
the Julian Hirsch Academy of Audio Design.

WHAT'S IN THE GROOVE?

Are you groovy? Have you found your groove? Who are
you grooving on? How deep is your groove? Why are these important questions?
The answer according to Jean Paul Satre, the French existential philosopher,
is "I groove, therefore I am ", or as we would say "Existence is predicated
on being in one's groove. Who really knows what's in the groove? Does
Michael Fermer know?

These question point us to the fundamental epistemological
paradox of the audio arts: What is in the groove is a fundamental mystery
and only you know what's in yours, and they are one and the same. Or put another
way..Not one single person can say "I know the nature of the MUSIC
input to any audio system". Question: If we don't know the nature of the
music input, how can we know the relative quality of the output (neutrality),
which is how we measure distortion? (Please don't insult my intelligence by
answering: a differential analysis of input/put with a noise signal)Yikes!

Is it possible that there are completely new ways
of extracting maximum music juice from that long black groove? Roll up what
I just said in a double EZ Wider and smoke it, and then just give this piece
a chance to bring you some peace.

What follows is another salvo in this campaign to
change your mind, and as you know, changing a man's mind, like breaking up,
is very hard to do, unless the rewards are enormous .like much
more really hot juicy endorphin pleasure like you experience when you
are doing your favorite things like eating vine ripe Georgia watermelon,
or gnawing on barbecued steak, or any facsimiles thereof that are too primal
to mention in an low music IQ industry that denies the existence of the human
body as the fundamental element of music consciousness.

TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION

I am suggesting that the dominant impulse of the audio
arts, for decades, has been CELEBRATE THE AUDIO ARTIST'S VANITY. It follows
that the driving impulse for every audio artist has been to create a truly
impressive audio gizmo, one that will satisfy editor's notion of what is good,
thereby gaining a very positive review, which is absolutely essential for
sales. I am suggesting this martini of audio artist's ego and reviewer's limited
expectations is a lethal cocktail, and gets in the way of creating maximum
musical pleasure for YOU, the gifted listener, whose artistic needs are much
more important than the audio designer's and audio reviewer's vanity. This
cabal must stop now. Am I putting myself out of a job? All that I am suggesting
is that we put your ego in the center of the audio cosmos, and remove the
audio artist and audio reviewer from that cherished position of male power.
That wont be easy.

MMJ/MAXIMUM MUSICAL JUICE PRINCIPAL

The only standard by which YOU should judge the value
of any audio gizmo is Can it do exactly what The Juiceman does in his
infomercial: extract maximum music juice from an input which always varies
wildly in quality. Any audio system, whose design inherently limits our
ability to extract MAXIMUM music juice from hundreds of differrent vinyl,
or CDs is inherently limiting our capacity for pleasure, and is therefore
anti-musical.

Again, and again .the only thing that we can
be certain of, when it comes to the groove, is that no two records, or CDs
are the same in production value; each its a unique work of art. How
groovy, and what a really thrilling artistic challenge.

From this point of view all existing phono preamps,
except one, the FM Acoustic, and most tone arms and turntables are based on
the erroneous assumption that there is a little, or no, variation in record
quality and production value. Our tradition of emphasis on static circuit
design, rather than on flexibility, is ready for the polyester double knit
suit bin.

When Bob Dylan sings, "Who do you serve?", the answer
must be (1) MUSIC, and it is fickle, changeable, and some of the best exists
in really weird grooves. When Bob Dylan sings, "Who do you serve, Mr. Audio
Artist Man?" the answer must be (2) YOU, the gifted listener who owns
hundred of different unique works of music.

From this day forward the highest accolade is Ten
Potties, which is awarded only when you can belch out, "This device permitted
me to extract the most musical pleasure from the most varied musical inputs".
I hereby grant permission to every audio reviewer and editor to use the Potty
rating system, and I ask for no royalties. This is the 4th Wave
Modality Imperative you should demand.

A GROOVY EXPERIENCE IN JAPAN IN 1984

Once again I will demonstrate how all of my brilliant
ideas are nothing more than a Goliath goulash of other's really brilliant
ideas.

If the goal is maximum juice from the groove then
it naturally follows .

I am in Tokyo at a Samurai audiomaniac's house and
I am staring at his turntable system, which is a string drive Micro-Seiki,
and on the shelf behind the turntable must be at least one dozen different
tone arms, each with a different cartridge, and each is mounted on machined
blocks of heavy dark wood so that any one of them can be put in place and
used with the turntable. This very refined gentlemen demonstrated, for me,
that he knew exactly which tone arm/cartridge combination squeezed the most
juice from his enormous vinyl collection. It took him just a few minutes to
detach one tone arm cartridge combination, and replace it with another.

NOBU SHISHIDO'S REAL GROOVY PASSION

Though Nobu was best known for his innovative circuits
for Class B DHTs and refinement of the interstage transformer for DHT SETs,
his passion was 78 vinyl playback and in his book, which you should read,
even though it is in Japanese, he describes his preamp design which has all
of these different controls so that the user can extract the maximum juice
from 78 records that have enormous variability just like 33 vinyl. Nobu,
near the end of his life, was also preaching a form of RIAA equalization that
is almost completely unknown in America.

VINYLMANIA 1977

Like every other audiomaniac, before the digital age,
I too had a vast collection of tone arms, cartridges and turntables. Right
in front of my listening seat was two turntables: both with removable headshells
and adjustable VTA. It is instructive to read back issue of Stereophile and
Absolute Sound from this period. I soon reached the conclusion that tone arms
had to have removable head shell and adjustable VTA for maximum juicification and
I didn't care if this was not the orthodoxy.

4TH WAVE MODALITY VINYL PLAYBACK

Marshall Mc Cluhan was right as soon as one technology
becomes obsolete it becomes the darling of connoisseurs which explains
the vitality of the vinyl arts. Vinyl is now the connoisseur's path. What
follows now is a brain tweak for vinylmaniacs. My purpose here is to expand
the vinyl meta-context and to inspire some HI-IQ audio artisan to start creating
4th Wave Modality phono/vinyl systems.

THE LEGO IMPERATIVE: Make phono preamps modular. We
are already into separate phono and line stages, but let's go further. We
can have a power supply that can power both a line stage and phono stage,
so we can mix and match different phono and line stages, each with a different
aroma.

NORMAL IS NOT COOL: For the last twenty five year
the orthodoxy in phono preamp design has been to use either 12AX7s or 6922s
because..not because these are the best tubes for the job, but because these
are cheap and available..again not necessarily the best tubes. But if we are
only going to make a couple of hundred phono preamps or twenty five or
fifty for the connoisseur, why not use connoisseur type tubes? Check
your tube chat rooms and you note the tube exotica now being used for phono
preamps.

RIAA NETWORKS: To squeeze long playing into a 12 inch
LP the signal must be compressed in a "standard " way and then expanded during
playback. This is called RIAA networks and there are dozens of different ways
to do this and each sounds different. The rage is the "RIAA modules" that
are available from Tango and Tamura (Japan) and are very expensive, but can
be moved from preamp to preamp. Check their web sites. Why shouldn't all RIAA
equalizer networks be modular so you can change them?

POWER SUPPLIES: At NYAL we used to sell the same phono
preamp with different power supplies because the PS is fifty percent of the
sonic personality and why shouldn't you be able to choose the type of barbecue
sauce that tastes best to you? How hard is this for the audio designer? A
little bit harder than raising the toilet seat.

MAGNETIC COUPLING: This is very exciting new very
old development. Why not use a grid choke instead of a 47K loading resistor?
Why not use an input transformer for magnetic cartridges? Why not use a plate
choke instead of plate resistor? Why not use an output transformer instead
of a cathode follower for the output stage? How difficult are these? Just
slightly harder than opening a can of Bud Light.

DHTS: At long last we have DHT that have the right
gain characteristics for line stages. My experience with the Manley 300B line
stage, Eric Barbour's article about using the SV 811 for a line stage, and
the new AVVT 20 means that a whole new world has opened for line stage design.
This is very major.

TONEARM SYSTEMS: In the good old days there were "tone
arm systems" which gave us lots of choices of which arm tube to use relative
to our favorite cartridge. I also once hot roded a tone arm and adapted it
so I could use a variety of my own home made wooden tone arms, which sounded
pretty amazing. At the very least a tone arm should have a removable headshell
so you can quickly change from your Grado to EMT, or choose among the MC that
makes your vinyl sound best.

TONEARM WIRING AND CONNECTIONS: Stop for one moment
and consider all of the electrical connections that exist between your phono
cartridge and phono preamp input. I did once, and I got some tone arm wire
and I made a cable that went directly from the cartridge and was hard wired
directly to the input of my phono preamp eliminating all of those electrical
connections which appear at exactly the worst place. Wholey Cow, what an improvement.
Now let's trace from those tiny little plated connectors that slip onto your
phono cartridge pin (bad) that are attached to your tone arm cables that are
then attached to plated RCA connectors (bad) and then a big fat cable with
plated male RCA plugs (very bad) that has big fat complicated wire (bad) gets
plugged into plated RCA plugs (bad). Can we have some more mercy on that tiny
little signal coming out of the cartridge? There is absolutely no reason why
that gossamer thin tone arm wire has to run through the arm, through the tone
arm base, and not directly into your phono preamp input. Is this crazy? Not
if you are a juiceholic.

TWO ARMED TURNTABLES: You wear two Colt 45s, don't
you? How tough is it to design a turntable that can use two tone arms? The
answer is about an extra few inches of wood or plastic. Want an experience
of ultra coolosity? Put both tone arms in the groove and switch between the
two while the record is playing? Which sounds is right? The one in the middle.

AN INSIGHT BY THE SULTA OF KIBOSH

I was once honored to have an audience why the Sultan
of Kibosh, one of the wealthiest men in the world, who had a harem of hundreds
of beauties. After interviewing him about his views on the world oil production,
I asked him,

"Sultan, can you tell me which is your favorite women
in your harem".

His reply was "How many years do you have?".

SUMMARY

You are now sitting in front of your turntable which
has two tone arms. To the right of it is a box of different cartridges mounted
in head shells. Your phono preamp is modular, and is not made with 12AXs or
6922s, and you now have a table cloth under your turntable because YOUR MUSIC
JUICE RUNETH OVER!

Over and out from the Nth Dimension of Music Hyper-Space
where there is only one music and it is you.